Psalm 46 (God is Our Refuge)

Psalm 46 was written by people who had walked through catastrophe and discovered that God had not moved an inch. It does not promise that nothing bad will happen. It promises something far sturdier: that when the worst happens, God is still there. Our security is not based on how tightly we grip God, but on how tightly He holds us. Jesus said that no one can take His sheep out of His hand. He did not say the ones who hold on most tightly are safe. He said they are held. The God of Jacob is a fortress not reserved for the spiritually impressive, but for flawed, wrestling, limping people. The world will keep shaking, but the God who meets us right where we are will not move.

Transcript

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Way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. This is not a psalm written by people who have not known catastrophe. This is a psalm written by people who have experienced catastrophe and found that on the other side of it, God has not moved a single inch. Psalm 46 belongs to a small cluster of psalms called the Zion Psalms. They're songs that celebrate God's dwelling with his people in Jerusalem. But don't be confused, this psalm is not some naive triumphalism. It doesn't say nothing bad will happen. It says something far sturdier for God's people. It says that when the worst happens, God Himself is still there. The psalm doesn't remove the earthquake, it removes our fear of the earthquake because it relocates our confidence from the ground beneath our feet to the God who's over the ground. Now this morning we're going to walk through Psalm 46 just in the way that it's built. There's three movements, each one ending on the same steady note. It's there's like a bell tolling beneath this psalm that you hear. And it's the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress. That's the bell that's ringing out from this psalm. And we're going to ask the same three questions of this psalm that we asked last week of the psalm that you ask of every single psalm. Number one, and these three questions are answered in our three points. Number one, what did the psalm mean to the people who first sang it in their own historical circumstances? So you see in that subheader of point one, the historical horizon. Secondly, how does this psalm find its full and final meaning in Jesus Christ, the true King in whom every psalm comes to rest? You see that subheading there, the Christological horizon. And I've told you every psalm points us to Jesus Christ. And thirdly, what does this psalm require of us this morning in this room, the local body of believers in 2026, as those who are united to that same Christ by faith? And we see that in that subheader number three, the congregational horizon. Now, this psalm, like every psalm, takes us to Christ, and it takes us to Christ very quickly. For without Christ, God is not your refuge. Without Christ, God is not your strength. Without Christ, God is not your help in time of trouble. In fact, without Christ, God is your worst enemy. And he would stand above you with a sword of justice that you cannot stop. In Christ, God becomes the greatest refuge, the greatest strength, and the greatest help in time of need for his people. And that's who we find our refuge in this morning. And it is in Christ that this psalm and all the psalms turn us from being an enemy of God to being a people who can now say, I trust in God in whom I take refuge. So firstly, this morning, God, our refuge in a shaking world, the historical horizon in verses one through three. So most scholars follow this psalm's likely connection to the events that we see in 2 Kings chapters 18 and 19. They place this psalm against the backdrop of the Assyrian invasion of Judah in 701 BC, or at least in the general experience of Judah living in the shadow of the Assyrian Empire and the Assyrian war machine. And I say war machine because Assyria was, in its day, one of the most terrifying empires on the face of the earth. It did not merely conquer, it boasted about its cruelty. Its own royal inscriptions describe impaling captives and building towers of skulls outside cities that it had conquered as a proclamation to the world that they were to be feared. When the Assyrian field commander stood outside Jerusalem's walls in Hezekiah's day, he did not whisper. He shouted in Hebrew, in the Hebrew language, he stood out and shouted so that the people on the wall could understand just exactly how afraid they should be. This empire instilled fear intentionally upon all who they conquered and whom they sought to conquer. Now, this is the world that we are stepping into in Psalm 46. And it already begins to make a little bit more sense to you now, doesn't it? God is our refuge. The Assyrians are at the gate. God is our refuge. This is not some abstract theology. This is a psalm for a people who could hear a foreign army gathering outside their gate. Their world seemed to be falling apart. The earth could probably literally be shaking under their feet from the marching of the coming army. And notice precisely what the psalm does not say. It does not say God will keep the earth from giving way. It says, though the earth gives way, we will not fear. This is the psalm's most striking feature that puts a nail in the coffin of the prosperity gospel. The confidence is not that disaster is impossible. It's that disaster is not ultimate. Mountains, the most stable things that we can imagine, especially what our ancient uh ancestors would have imagined, are the very foundations of the world. And here they are pictured toppling into a churning sea. It's this vision of a complete cosmic unraveling. And the psalmist response to that vision is not, how could this ever happen? It's not God's gonna go back in time and set this straight. It's not God's gonna come in and put the mountain back where it needs to go. The psalmist response is even if the mountain falls, we will not fear. But today, we as a people actually should not need much imagination to feel this same thing. We are a church that regularly teaches and preaches about the providence of God. This is not new to you if you go to this church. The doctrine of God's providence exists precisely because Christians have always lived in a world where mountains do, in a manner of speaking, fall into the sea. It gives us the authority as God's people, and it gives us the strength as God's people to say, in the midst of the earthquakes, I don't understand what God is doing, but I know where God is standing. He is not far off. That's Psalm 46, verse 1. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, spoken in the hospital corridor, or spoken as you're standing outside watching your house burned to the ground, or hearing bad news in the doctor's office, or in the morgue, or at the funeral. Instead of just being sung in a Jerusalem street, God is our refuge, our strength, a very present help in time of trouble. Now, the Hebrew word behind very present help is actually interesting because it doesn't mean it's merely available. And what I mean by that is many of you in here may have a fire extinguisher at home in your kitchen. I think we do, I'm not exactly sure. I should have checked before the sermon. Many of you like me may be like, I think I've got a fire extinguisher in the kitchen. I'm not sure if it works. It may be available if I need it. Or if you just go around commercial buildings, fire extinguishers behind the glass. And what happened, what has to happen to stay up to code is that fire marshals have to come and make sure that they are functional. That if you need it, that that fire extinguisher is available. That's not what the Hebrew word is describing of God here, that he's a very present help. That's available if you need him. It runs much deeper than that. It's a wording that says it's a proven, tested, trusted foundation that is 100% absolutely certain and found to be true by experience. In other words, the psalmist here is saying God has a covenant with his people, his love is steadfast, and we know it to be true because it has been tested time and time and time and time again, and God has always been faithful to his people. And here we are thousands of years later, and we can echo the same thing through the journey of God's people that God has a 100% track record of always being faithful to his people. And our reliance on the refuge that God is, the strength that he provides, and the help in time of trouble. Here's the best part. Again, we reiterate this all the time. This is not based on our nearness to him, but his nearness to us. That is exactly the theology of verse one. The Psalm does not measure God's presence by the strength of our grip onto him, it measures our security by the strength of his grip onto us. This is why Jesus says that no one can take his sheep out of his hand. He doesn't say no one can take the ones that hold on more tightly, like God is dangling his hand over, and we've got to hang on to the rope, and we are sitting secure in his hand, and none can take us out. God is our refuge is a statement about God's character. It's a statement about God's posture toward his people, not a report on how brave or how composed his people feel in the moment the disaster strikes. When the earth gives way, we don't feel steady. Many of us in this room have gotten the phone calls or we've seen the lab reports, we've gotten the devastating news that just hits us like a gut punch. Many of you in here know what that feels like. And when that happens, you don't feel steady. When the earth gives way, we don't feel steady, nor do we in that moment muster up the strength to find steady ground. But praise be to God that he is there for his people through Christ. He is our refuge, he is our strength, he is our very help in times of trouble. That's who he is to his people simply because that's who he is, period. He has a steadfast covenant love with his people. And this is historically what God's people have always experienced and will continue to experience forever. Secondly, God our peace amidst nations at war, getting to the Christological horizon. We see in verse four, there is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the most high God. We have this uh shift from this cosmic chaos to really to a political state uh chaos. Uh, we see in verse six, the nations rage, the kingdoms totter. He utters his voice, the earth melts. And we also see this introduction of a river. Now, this is geographically strange because if you go back to the history of the area, Jerusalem, unlike Babylon on the Euphrates or Egypt and the Nile, had no great river. It had the Gihon Spring, a very modest spring. So the river of verse 4 is not a natural river to Jerusalem. We're speaking in theological terms here. Now, in ancient literature and many times in scripture, which adopts this same mentality, water is often related to chaos, figuratively speaking. And then we actually see water being chaotic in the Gospels. And we see Jesus on a multitude of occasions shows his power over the water by calming the stormy seas. And then we see Jesus walking on the water. So here, what's interesting is the psalm does not run away from that which figuratively usually represents chaos. Instead, what it does is it overcomes chaos and uses that same symbolism to deliver peace. The symbolism of water, which usually represents chaos, is now used to represent joy. God has taken that which is chaotic and turns it into joy. Now it echoes Eden, where a river went out to water the garden. It anticipates Ezekiel's river flowing from the millennial temple, John's river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. This river represents the presence of God bringing gladness and life to his city, even while the nations outside rage and topple like the mountains and the sea. So here the historical horizon from point one opens up into this Christological horizon and application. The city of God in verse 4 is not ultimately the physical Jerusalem of Hezekiah's day. That city, in fact, did eventually fall in AD 70, just as Jesus predicted that it would in Matthew 24. The unshakable city, the Psalm describes here, is the greater Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, as Hebrews calls it. It's the assembly of God's people for all eternity gathered around Christ. And the river that makes its glad is not water at all. In John chapter 7, standing in the temple during the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus stood up and said, If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. John tells us plainly that this refers to the Spirit, whom those who believed in Jesus were later to receive. So do you see what this means? Psalm 46 promises a city made glad by a river flowing from the presence of God in her midst. Jesus Christ comes later and announces himself as the source of that very river. So Jesus is not merely a refuge alongside God, he is God Himself. He's the Emmanuel of verses 7 and verses 11. The Lord of hosts is with us. Why do you think Matthew chose in his gospel to use this same language to describe Jesus? When he records the announcement of Christ's birth, he goes out of his way to translate the name for us all. They shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God with us. The refrain that studies Psalm 46, God with us, is not a phrase that Matthew circumstantially put in his gospel. It is a phrase that Matthew deliberately picked up and placed like a banner over the incarnated Christ, God in the flesh. You want to know what Psalm 46 is talking about? The Lord of hosts is with us. Here he is, Jesus Christ. So when the Psalm says that God is our refuge, it's pointing us to Christ. Jesus Christ is our refuge, and he's your only refuge. You have no refuge outside of Christ. Now we should feel the force of this against our own moment, not just Hezekiah's with the gathering of the Assyrian army. We live in a world that, like Judah under Assyria's shadow, is not short on raging nations and tottering kingdoms. I read a book one time on nuclear war. I can't remember what it was called. A very interesting book talking about nuclear war. And basically, here's the gist of it. Nobody has the capability to stop a nuclear warhead. So the only defense against nuclear war is a good offense. So if one nation decides to shoot a nuclear warhead against another nation, your only defense is to shoot off as many as you can back before it hits. Triggers World War III. And the interesting thing about this book is it explained how quickly all of that would happen. And we're talking less than a day when billions in this world could be wiped out. We are not living in the stability that we think we have on the ground under our feet. The nations rage. And there are tottering kingdoms, just like Psalm says. Turn on the news any given day, and you can find nations collapsing, currencies collapsing, border wars, cities under bombardment around the globe. It would be easy to conclude that the modern world is uniquely unstable, uniquely fragile, uniquely frightening. But remember, Psalm 46 was written by a people who had already watched empires change more quickly than Texas weather, and who had already learned that the city of God does not stand or fall with any of them. The river of God's presence in the midst of his people flowed under Assyrian threat in 701 BC, under Babylonian threat a century later. Under Roman occupation in the first century, and it flows still by the Holy Spirit in the midst of Christ's church today. He is here with us this very morning. What that means is that right now, all of our phones could go off with an emergency alert, and we could all go outside, and you could watch a nuclear warhead going over our church, and we could just say God is our refuge. We have hope in Christ. This is why Psalm can say that that city shall not be moved. Even while the world around it convulses and collapses, not because Christians are exempt from earthquakes, illnesses, political corruptions, invading armies, the crossfire nations, or nuclear war. We definitely are not exempt from those things, but because our fortress, unlike the world, that puts its faith in empires, our fortress is in a person. And that person cannot be moved. He was not moved by Herod's soldiers. He was not moved by the wilderness temptations. He was not moved by the crowds that tried to throw him off a cliff at Nazareth. He was not moved by Pilate. And he was not moved by the grave. God is in the midst of her. She shall not be moved, reaches its fullest sense only when we know and understand and comprehend that God Himself, as Jesus Christ, walked into a shaking, warring, dying world, and he rose again out on the other side of the worst thing that could happen to him. Again, I tell you, dear brothers and sisters, Jesus Christ is our refuge. He's the only refuge that you have that is reliable. Now Martin Luther knew this psalm very intimately. In 1527, the plague broke out in Wittenberg. And Luther, rather than fleeing the city as many did, he chose to stay and minister to the sick and the dying, turning his house into a hospice for the suffering. Even while having his own personal troubles, facing accusations, exhaustion, he now adds to it the real danger of infection to himself and his family. Now it was in the years surrounding that, all that struggle, and seeing that, that he wrote Einfesteburg ist und many of you don't speak German. It's translated, a mighty fortress is our God. Courtney has instructions as to be sung at my funeral. A hymn built almost line by line on Psalm 46, and we have to understand Luther did not write that hymn from a place of safety. He wrote it while burying his neighbors. And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us, we will not fear, for God hath willed his truth to triumph through us. That is Psalm 46, sung by a man who had every reason, humanly speaking, to be afraid, and yet instead fixed his eyes on the God who does not move. Now, thirdly, be still and know the call to trust the victorious God, verses 8 through 11. This is where we see this congregational horizon. How are we to respond? Verse 8, come behold the works of the Lord, how he has brought desolations on the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth, he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the chariots with fire. Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth. We see an invitation. Come, behold. And what it invites us to behold is God's total effortless sovereignty over every weapon human beings have ever devised to make each other afraid. They've just gotten more and more as humanity has advanced. Bows, spears, chariots. Then we get to World War I. You know what's what's what's crazy to think of World War I and World War II, we think of them as so close together, and yet they were fought so differently. And World War II was fought so much with battleships, and those same battleships, if war were to break out today, are almost useless. And so as humanity advances, these weapons advance more. It doesn't matter what they are. God effortlessly, sovereignly rules over them all. God does not merely win the war, he ends the warfare itself. He snaps these weapons like kindling in his hands. And then comes verse 10, often the most quoted and misquoted line in the whole psalm. Be still and know that I'm God. Now we tend to hear this as a gentle word to an anxious individual and something we might get cross-stitched onto a pillow for a worried heart. But in its context, this is actually a word of command to the raging nations of verse 6. It's closer to stop enough. Put down your weapons and acknowledge who I am. It's a sovereign command to rebellious kingdoms to cease their futile hostility because God will be exalted among the nations. He says, I will be exalted among the earth. This is not a soft word. It is a word of judgment and a word of triumph spoken by God, who will be acknowledged as supreme, whether the nations like it or not. But the very God who speaks that word of command over raging nations is the same God who said in verse one that he is our refuge and our strength. The sovereignty that terrifies his enemies is the same very sovereignty that steadies his people. This is not a psalm with two different gods in it. There's one God. And his absolute rule over history is precisely why his people can rest, but not those who are not his people. The nations that rage, he will snap them like kindling, and only his people will find refuge. This is why I tell you to come to faith in Christ Jesus. Now think here of C.S. Lewis's Narnia, The Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe. And there's a moment where the children first hear that Aslan is a lion. You know this well. They hear that Aslan's a lion and not a man, and Susan asked nervously, well, is he quite safe? And Mrs. Beaver's answer has become proverbial in Christian circles, as C.S. Lewis meant it to be for good reason. And she said, Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn't safe, but he's good. He's the king, I tell you. Psalm 46 will not let us domesticate God into some kind of tame household comfort. The same God that shatters spears and burns chariots is not a safe pet that we keep for our own peace of mind. He's the most dangerous thing in the universe to his enemies. But for his people, he is an a movable fortress against all our enemies in whom we find great refuge. This is where our convictions about the sovereignty of God and God's providence stop being some abstract doctrine that we talk about, preach about, learn about, and it becomes the very ground that we stand on. Because we don't believe that God is doing his best to manage a chaotic world, and we're just watching him struggle to manage it. We believe with the psalmist that the nations rage and the kingdom's totter are precisely within the bounds of a God who utters his voice and thereby melts the earth. Nothing is loose, nothing is out of his control, not Assyria in 701 BC, not Rome in AD 70, not the empires that you'll see on your news feeds this week. And for you, not the news that you hear in the doctor's office, not the lab reports that pop up on your phone, not the bad news from the phone call that you get. There is nothing that occurs outside of the refuge that we have in Almighty God. Rest in that, dear brother and dear sister. You have a refuge in Christ. As the text says, the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress. Now I told you that's kind of a tolling bell throughout this psalm that's ringing out. The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress. Now notice what it says here. I don't know if you caught it. It doesn't say the God of Abraham, it doesn't say the God of Isaac. It says the God of Jacob. My question to you is why? Why Jacob? Remember who Jacob was. Jacob was a schemer, the deceiver, the man who wrestled with God and limped away from the encounter for the rest of his life. If the God of Jacob, the flawed, wrestling, limping patriarch, is our fortress, then that tells me that this refuge is not reserved. Stay with me here. This refuge is not reserved for the spiritually impressive. It is for people exactly like Jacob. It's for people exactly like you and me. So what do we do with that on a Sunday morning when the world still shakes? And we do not pretend that the earthquake, the diagnoses, the headlines, the wars, the fear, the twisting of the nations is not real. Psalm 46 never asks us to pretend that none of that stuff is real. It asks us to relocate our confidence off of the mountains which move and onto God who does not. And we have to stop trying to find rest in anything else, whether that be ourselves, whether that be our health, whether that be our money, whether that be our position, whether that be our community, our relationships, we have to stop trying to find rest and anything else, because at any moment, any of those things can give way, but God will not. We have to find our rest in God through Christ Jesus. And in Christ, we know something glorious. That this God does not merely promise to be with us from a safe distance. His covenant with his people caused him to come to us, to physically come to us, and absorb the worst blow that this world had to offer on the cross. And he walked out of that tomb, having broken the bow and shattered the spear of death itself for all of his people. Church be still, not as in a passive and not as in unafraid by sheer effort of will, but still as those who have looked at what God has done and who have found, just like Martin Luther in the plague stricken city, like Jacob limping home, that the ground beneath us was never really any foundation at all. It offers no sure foundation. Nothing does except God. Only God offers you a sure foundation. God is our refuge and our strength, very present help in trouble. And that bell rings. The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress. Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, I pray that.